Tag Archives: Keiko Matsui

The bulk of the tracks from albums in the F’s are definitely Final Fantasy tracks. Mostly just FFVII and its spin-offs, but also a few from FFs IV, V, VIII, IX, and XIII. But, I don’t think it’s particularly necessary to promote FF’s music, especially not the track that is my favorite, “Advent: One-Winged Angel.”

Whoops, I went and promoted it anyway. >o<;

I don’t like the Advent Children Complete version as much, because it has a long pause for the scene that I really wish hadn’t been added to that fight.

Alright, might as well bring up my favorite FF track that isn’t super famous. Out of all the airship themes in the seven main FF games I’ve played, FFVIII definitely wins with “Ride On.” I used to fly around aimlessly in the Ragnarok just to hear it! And the Ragnarok is definitely my favorite FF airship. It’s just cool. Honestly, the whole “boats flying in the air” thing always seemed mighty ridiculous to me. ^_^;

Last, I’ll end with a track from my very first CD ever. Keiko Matsui’s Full Moon and the Shrine, from 1998. I fell in love with the track “Steps in the Night” when I heard it on Smooth Jazz V98.7. This was the first time in my life that I felt that I should have an official recording, not just my taped-off-the-radio copy. (I had amassed quite an army of music taped off the radio by then, ahaha.) My brother gave me the album as a birthday gift, but I didn’t even have a CD player! I would play it in his CD player until I got my own CD player 2 years later.

The album also came with a digital copy of the music video for the title track, but my family didn’t have a computer back then. I didn’t get to see the video until I went to college; one day it occurred to me to try to play the video on the school’s computers. Nowadays, the format of the file is so old none of my Mac computers recognize it. Don’t know if it would still work on a PC.

The first time I came to Japan, when people would ask me what Japanese artists I liked, I would mention Keiko Matsui in addition to GACKT, L’arc~en~ciel, and Hikaru Utada, but barely anyone knew who she was. (That said, my host father in Hiroshima didn’t know who GACKT was, and it amused my host mother so much that a foreigner would know a Japanese artist while a Japanese wouldn’t. ^o^;)

Anyway, the video to “Full Moon and the Shrine” was filmed at the famous Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima, and features what look like gagaku dancers. Well, I didn’t know that when I first saw the video, but when I visited Itsukushima Shrine, luck would have it that someone was having their wedding there, complete with gagaku dance and music! They must have been very rich!